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In Malaysia, Get-Rich-Quick scheme (GRQS) is one of the financial fraud activities prohibited under Malaysian law. The common facet of such schemes involves plans that promise unrealistic rates of returns, and this new scheme continues to proliferate every year as the list of illegal investment companies and websites are growing. Indeed, GRQS will remain proliferating as long as there are people who are easily lured by the promise that wealth can be generated with little skill, effort or time. This paper aims to explain the phenomenon of GRQS in light of the existing laws in Malaysia. This paper also highlights the current development of Australian law pertaining to GRQS for comparative purpose.

This paper mainly relies on statutes as its primary sources of information. As such, this paper analyses the scope and provisions of the relevant laws that regulate GRQS and compare the existing GRQS provisions that are equivalent with Australian law.

Malaysia has comprehensive laws to combat GRQS activities. However, these laws are far from perfection, and only with immediate amendments, GRQS problems can be resolved more effectively. One of the weaknesses of current Malaysian laws to tackle GRQS is the lack of more stringent punishment against the operators of GRQS as well as the participants of the scheme. A comparison with equivalent GRQS law in Australia demonstrates that Australian laws provide a wide range of punishment to the operators and prohibits participation in GRQS. More importantly, Australia regards the offense as a strict liability offense where the mens rea or guilty mind of the perpetrators is exempted. Indeed, numerous proceedings have been instituted in the Australian Court against the operators and participants of GRQS.

This paper analyses the scope of relevant laws in Malaysia to combat GRQS and examines the strengths and weaknesses of these laws. This paper also compares Malaysian law with equivalent GRQS-related laws available in Australia. This paper further suggests that Malaysia should regulate sterner punishment for operators and participants of the scheme and that the offense is categorized under a strict liability offense where the mens rea or guilty mind of the offender is exempted.

This paper aims to identify psychological factors that influence people to be involved in Ponzi and pyramid schemes.

A psychological approach to finance or behavioural finance is applied in this research because of the assumption that human beings are not always rational. The sample consisted of 98 investors in 11 cities in Indonesia who were or had invested in an investment program with a Ponzi or pyramid scheme. The snowball sampling technique was applied.

The conclusion is that optimism (emotional bias), confirmation bias, representativeness bias, framing bias and overconfidence (cognitive bias) positively influenced investment decisions related to Ponzi and pyramid schemes.

The novelty aspect of this research is the implementation of a behavioural finance perspective to answer and express the fascinating phenomenon of Ponzi and pyramid investment schemes.

This paper aims to chart the enforcement actions taken by the Malaysian regulatory authorities in relation to illegal investment schemes in Malaysia, and clarifies the various strategies adopted by the Malaysian regulatory authorities to ensure protection of investors in the capital market. The enforcement actions relate to the Swisscash scheme as well as commodities futures involving crude palm oil and a more recent case involving gold futures. These schemes share similar characteristics with Ponzi schemes that were thrust into the international limelight in the notorious Madoff Ponzi scheme and its allegation of regulatory failure.

The paper clarifies, by way of case study, public enforcement of illegal investment schemes promoted through the Internet and schemes involving cross-border investments.

The enforcement powers of the regulatory authorities in Malaysia are being utilized to ensure compliance with the law. The enforcement actions by the regulatory authorities in the afore-stated cases are significant in view of the successful custodial sentence of imprisonment, the regulators’ public enforcement action intended to compensate investors and the most recent case which is unfolding, due to the large number of alleged perpetrators and significant wealth transfer involved.

Given the allegation of regulatory failure in other jurisdictions, this paper enables a view to be formulated of the timeliness and appropriateness of the enforcement actions.

This paper aims to explore various cultural and behavioral issues associated with the problem of investment fraud in Indonesia.

By examining multiple cases of investment fraud in Indonesia as well as reviewing publicly available government reports, this study highlights several important cultural and behavioral issues associated with the susceptibility of Indonesian financial services consumers to investment fraud to understand better the dynamics of the victimization process. By using multiple cultural and behavioral theories, this study demonstrates how such issues shape the interactions between investment fraudsters and investment fraud victims.

This study demonstrates that multiple cultural and behavioral factors have created and shaped an environment where fraudsters can exploit people’s behavioral loopholes for their fraudulent schemes. In particular, the high power distance and high collectivism have been identified by this study as contributing to the high level of materialism in the country, which in turn makes people more susceptible to the temptation of get-rich-quick schemes. Investment fraudsters, being students of human behavior, use their behavioral knowledge to devise various means to deceive their victims. They use multiple psychological principles to stimulate target victims “gullibility to make them more vulnerable to fraudulent persuasion. In many cases, even financially literate people are not immune to fraudsters” deceitful messages. This study highlights gullibility production as a foundation for investment fraudsters to devise their means by which victims are manipulated to accept certain beliefs that depart from facts and evidence.

This paper contributes to the innovation in anti-fraud practice by building a better understanding of multiple cultural and behavioral issues associated with investment fraud victimization.

This paper brings a new perspective into the field of anti-fraud to stimulate innovation, in particular in investment fraud prevention.

For me the term ‘pyramid selling’ conjures up a picture of back street Cairo, with wily Arab entrepreneurs trying to con gullible tourists into buying a bit of the old Tutankhamens. The image is not totally inappropriate, as Consumer Affairs Minister, Michael Howard, warned when launching a new leaflet on Pyramid selling issued by the Department of Trade and Industry: ‘…get‐rich‐quick schemes which do not depend on getting out and selling a good product can end in disappointment and disaster for many people’. The new leaflet answers the most common questions about pyramid selling and outlines the statutory provisions governing such schemes. Copies can be obtained free from your local Trading Standards Department or direct from DTI Headquarters Library, Ashdown House, 1–19 Victoria Street, London SW1H0ET.

In today’s competitive environments, a growing number of firms are establishing their presence through the Web sites. Based on Steuer’s (1992) and Rheingold’s (1993) arguments on perceptual experience in the virtual space, this paper provides a theoretical framework that highlights the effects of interactivity, immersion, and association for customers. The paper argues that though interactivity, immersion, and association are critical for attracting customers on a Web site, these characteristics may also lead to social, ethical and privacy concerns among customers that many unscrupulous firms tend to exploit for their advantages. Interactivity has been measured through speed, range, and significance of interactivity. Immersion has been measured through breadth and depth of immersion. Association has been categorized into one‐to‐one or many‐to‐many relationships. Four Web sites, amazon.com, eBay.com, schwab.com, and victoriasecret.com, are analyzed with respect to interactivity, immersion, and association. The implications of the use and abuse of interactivity, immersion, and association are discussed.

Betting games have become a global industry worth billions of dollars providing employment to millions and contributing to the gross domestic product (GDP) of several countries. While there are debates and controversies surrounding betting games discourse, a growing body of literature shows that it has been exacerbated by growing unemployment rates. This paper aims to examine the nexus between the increasing involvement of youth in betting games and unemployment from the Nigerian perspective.

The study adopts simple random and stratified sampling techniques to select participants for the study. Three hypotheses were tested for this study and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation model (SEM) was used to test the hypotheses.

The three hypotheses tested in this study were coined from previous literature. The study established a direct link between technology advancement, promises of winning big coupled with bonuses while unemployment was not significant to youth involvement in betting games. The study also showed that playing betting games provides another source of income to the youth, who are already engaged in one form of work or another. Finally, youth involvement in betting games has created awareness regarding different sports in the world, while contributing to Nigeria’s economy.

As betting games centre as a business in Nigeria has contributed substantially and positively to unemployment in Nigeria; the Government of Nigeria are encouraged to streamline and regulate the activities of the sector such that they can contribute significantly to the country GDP and provide employment opportunities to the youths.

The research shows that the reason why betting games have a massive turnaround of youths in Nigeria is not majorly because of unemployment but as another means to a substantial financial individual/family income. Thus, Nigerian youths see betting games as an avenue to make more money. The study is the first of its kind to examine the nexus between betting games, technology and unemployment hence, its contribution to knowledge.

The purpose of this study is to identify the significant demographic and socio-economic characteristics of individuals who are likely to invest in a fraudulent investment scheme. It also quantifies the extent to which financial literacy helps in reducing the odds of investments in such schemes. Based on these findings, it provides policy recommendations to regulators and governments.

This study uses nationally representative data from the “India Assessment of Financial Capability 2018” survey. It further uses logistic regression with a binary outcome variable to assess the individual-level odds of investments in fraudulent investment schemes.

This study concludes that males between 40 and 59 years of age, who are well-educated (are at least graduates), score low in financial literacy, belong to the middle-income group, and SEC A3 households are most vulnerable to victimization by financial fraudulent investment schemes. It finds that financial literacy significantly reduces the odds of investment into fraudulent schemes to the extent of 39.118%.

This study quantifies the extent to which financial literacy helps in reducing the odds of individual investments in a fraudulent investment scheme. As financial literacy has a significant and negative relationship with the likelihood of investment in such schemes, this study provides policy interventions and recommendations to regulators and governments to safeguard the interest of individual investors.

When Peter Steiner published his famous cartoon in The New Yorker in July 1993 with the renowned caption ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you are a dog’, he succeeded in coining within a single cartoon strip the core cause of a multitude of problems that e‐businesses face today. The new communications technologies allow almost anyone to have the ability to deceitfully pass oneself off as someone worthy of trust and reliability for the purpose of personal gain. Conversely, proving or disproving one's trustworthiness to strangers online without specific technologies like public key infrastructure and digital signatures is a near fruitless exercise. While such security technologies are able to resolve identity issues, it has proven to be both difficult and expensive to implement them successfully.